Notes from 15/4–21/4/19

Oh I realise people actually read this! Feel free to drop me a text on telegram @fishbiscuit if you’d like to express something or discuss a topic

General

Do You Suffer from Illusions of Moral Superiority?

Self-righteousness makes you focus on yourself rather than on trying to understand others. It reduces our willingness to cooperate or compromise — it creates a wall between “us” and “them.”

Self-serving justifications, when we intentionally violate an ethical rule, mitigate the threat to our moral self — we do ‘wrong’ while feeling moral. Consider a man who invites his dad to a fancy restaurant to show him he’s doing well. He justifies expensing the dinner because his father ‘always gives him sound business advice.’

Our moral lens is like a blindfold — we judge people without seeing who they indeed are.

Groups distort our sense of moral superiority and moral tribalism. How can you move a country forward when both parties are attacking each other? Rather than building on each other’s best ideas, they only care about theirs. The same happens with religion — churches are more preoccupied about beliefs and dogma than to help people. Salvation doesn’t matter unless you choose their way.

Intellectual honesty is about finding the best solution, not to win the discussion.

A Math Teacher’s Life Summed Up By The Gifted Students He Mentored

The effect on one’s life when they are believed by others.

From Macintosh to Granny Smith: The rise and fall of Apple

In asking Apple to innovate once more, the directive isn’t to rip up their product roadmap and halt all production of phones. For a large enterprise like Apple, steering the whole company in a new direction is neither feasible nor desirable.

Instead, Apple needs the framework other large companies are discovering to install a permanent, always-on growth capability.

Operators like Tim Cook focus the whole org on the “Big to Bigger” picture. That is, how do we take an existing business and scale it?

Instead, Cook should focus the company on discovering new customer problems and new businesses. For that, he needs talent and capital that run in tandem with the company’s established business. This new arm should be tasked with discovering and validating new customer problems worth solving, so the company is always analyzing the Total Addressable Problem (TAP) in a new area before it ever considers a Total Address Market (TAM). The latter is about what is today. The former is about what could be.

Sometimes it’s the challenge of maintaining a lead. I wonder if they do some futuring/scenario planning.

Notre-Dame Cathedral: Facts and a Brief History

So many historic moments. And this wasn’t the first time the notre dame was burned down. Attests to human resilience when something has become a part of national identity.

Susan Sontag on Storytelling, What It Means to Be a Moral Human Being, and Her Advice to Writers

To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.

To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.

When we make moral judgments, we are not just saying that this is better than that. Even more fundamentally, we are saying that this is more important than that. It is to order the overwhelming spread and simultaneity of everything, at the price of ignoring or turning our backs on most of what is happening in the world.

The nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention — a capacity that, inevitably, has its limits but whose limits can be stretched.

But perhaps the beginning of wisdom, and humility, is to acknowledge, and bow one’s head, before the thought, the devastating thought, of the simultaneity of everything, and the incapacity of our moral understanding — which is also the understanding of the novelist — to take this in.

How Kevin Feige Super-Charged Marvel Studios Into Hollywood’s Biggest Hit Machine

Feige’s fandom isn’t an act — and isn’t limited to superheroes. He listens to film scores while driving, boasts an office filled with Ewok plush toys and Jabba the Hut figurines, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of everything from the history of iconic horror movie villain Jason Voorhees to songwriting duo the Sherman Brothers. On vacation, Feige likes to take his extended family to Orlando’s Disney World; at home, he’ll regularly visit nearby Disneyland with his 10-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son. When Disney announced it was buying Marvel, Feige met with Iger and stressed his love of all things Magic Kingdom by flashing his Disney Vacation Club Card. Sartorially, the Marvel boss always looks like he could be manning a booth at Comic-Con. His standard outfit consists of a T-shirt, jeans and a baseball cap.

Article exudes the sheer genius of being able to create an intertwined universe and the massive extended cast that needs to believe in the vision and execute it.

Blockchain

Token Taxonomy Initiative

Good to keep track.

Microsoft and Gitcoin Team Up to Turn the Traditional Hackathon Model Upside Down

So this has been done before. giving out gitcoin bounties for hackathons.

Distributed Ledger Technology

it opens with a grammatically incorrect line “What Do Distributed Ledger Bring To The Table?”

Okay nothing to read here.

Computer Science

WebAssembly Is Fast: A Real-World Benchmark of WebAssembly vs. ES6

When developing for the web, there have been plenty of times where I couldn’t bring my idea to fruition due to browser performance. Browsers do not run instructions directly like a compiled executable written in C. Browsers have to download, parse, interpret, and Just-In-Time (JIT) compile JavaScript (JS / ES6).

Really interesting way to test performance on browsers. I’m not totally sure what wasm is but it seems to be enabling a whole new world of web apps. Probably the future would just be a simple laptop but extremely powerful web apps.

Infrastructure as Code, Part One

There are basically two categories of tools:

1. Orchestration tools are used to provision, organize, and manage infrastructure components. Examples include Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Azure Resource Manager.

2. Configuration management tools are used to install, update, and manage the software running on the infrastructure components. Examples include SaltStack, Puppet, Chef, and Ansible.

IaaS to remove the potential of human failure as much as possible.

Why software projects take longer than you think — a statistical model

People estimate the median completion time well, but not the mean.

The mean turns out to be substantially worse than the median, due to the distribution being skewed (log-normally).

When you add up the estimates for n tasks, things get even worse.

Tasks with the most uncertainty (rather the biggest size) can often dominate the mean time it takes to complete all tasks.

The mean time to complete a task we know nothing about is actually infinite.

Interesting way to make use of the normal distribution to validate a long-standing hunch.

Comprehensive Introduction to Autoencoders

Variational autoencoders: learn latent features about a particular situation, allowing you to change these parameters and generate new ones

Encoder is learning an appxorimatino to the posterior distribution. Cannot be done analytically due to lack of a closed form solution. We are performing a form of Bayesian updating.

The inherent nature of the learning procedure means that parameters that look similar are clustered together in the latent space and not spaced arbitrarily.

Encoder function phi maps X to latent space F. Decoder psi maps F to the output.

standard neural network function where z is latent dimension

Decoding function represented in same fashion but different variables

Loss function is standard backprop procedure

Some types:

1. Denoising — adds some white noise to data prior to training but compare the error to the original image when training. Force it to not overfit to arbitrary noise. Used to remove creases and darkened areas from scanned images
2. Sparse — larger latent dimension than input or output. Only a fraction of the neurons fire. Form of regulariastino to reduce propensity for overfitting
3. Contractive — Add a regulariser to the loss function

Coding tutorial is included and gives examples on image generation and text cleaning.

This guy is a PhD researcher at Harvard! Really like the community initiative to make something to help others understand.

Gentle Dive into Math Behind Convolutional Neural Networks

Ah it goes pretty deep into the math behind it! Well explained and has some images too to help you understand what convolution is about. Would be good to have some sharing on how this has been used/might be used.

Life Optimisation

How the Ancient Art of Wu Wei can Make You Calmer, Less Frustrated, and More Effective

Wu wei can also often translated as non-action, which sounds like an advocation to be a lazy deadshit, but is actually the idea of being more effective when you’re not forcing a situation. We cannot hope to persistently control a world that is hell-bent on doing what it wants. Instead, we can take each situation as it comes, and act in accordance with the unique conditions of the circumstances. The alternative is a path to teeth-grinding frustration. The expectations that we bear, and the force that we use to impose them, are the source of much irritation and resentment.

Ah so I was secretly still Taoist afterall. I must have misinterpreted non-action when I was younger. I tend to call it synergy or alignment now.

Managing Yourself: How to Calibrate Your Own Strengths and Weaknesses

Immediately reminscent of Drucker.

This entire article seems to revolve around the idea of personal mastery. It provides some recommendations as to how to improve your own self-awareness/data collection. But it’s much harder to implement in actuality. Worth a shot though!

A three-step framework for solving problems 🤔

Step 1: Crystallize the problem you are solving

• Description: What is it?
• Problem: What problem is this solving?
• Why: How do we know this is a real problem and worth solving?
• Success: How do we know if we’ve solved this problem?
• Audience: Who are we building for?
• What: What does this look like in the product?

Step 2: Align on the problem with your team and stakeholders

1. I take a crack at Step 1 (but again, it can be anyone on your team that’s passionate about the particular problem)
2. Share the draft with the entire team that’ll be involved in this project. Ask for feedback (in comments, in email, or in person). Integrate the feedback, and re-share.
3. If the feedback is converging and the team seems aligned, great. If not, pull everyone together and chat through disagreements in person.
4. Once your team is aligned, share with your stakeholders. It’s extremely important that your team and the folks judging your success are aligned on the problem you are solving before you get too deep into design/eng.
5. Bring the team together for an in-person kickoff where you again review the problem statement, answer any outstanding questions, and make sure your team has everything they need to get rolling.

Step 3: Keep coming back to the problem

1. In every design review, make sure the designers start by reviewing the problem statement. If it’s not clear, ask “What problem are we trying to solve?”
2. In every progress update to stakeholders, review the problem statement to make sure everyone continues to be aligned on the outcome.
3. Before finalizing designs make sure to ask yourself: “Am I feeling confident this is going to solve the problem we set out to solve?”

Our 6 Must Reads for Honing Focus and Managing Your Time

the most productive people aren’t the ones who are juggling the most commitments. They’re the ones operating most intentionally.

PREAAAACH

Fend off distractions by observing triggers and making pacts.

before you can beat distraction, you need to understand where it’s coming from. be curious about it. create a Ulysses pact. Find a focus partner. Reimagine the task (so it’s more invigorating)

2. Compromise on “sand,” not on “rocks” — and embrace your inner laziness when it comes to email.

do not compromise on key tasks.

3. Engineer your schedule according to your energy.

track how you feel each hour of the day based on energy level to know if you’re a morning/afternoon/evening person

4. Audit your calendar with discipline and diligence.

check if your calendar reflects the priorities you have, if you need more time for a particular activity and if you have the discpline to disconnect and step away from other things

5. Generate momentum by prioritizing in two-week sprints and six-month goals.

Prioritizing biweekly themes creates enough momentum to create real value in a particular area of the business, but not so much as to cause a terrible setback if the intended results aren’t achieved.”

6. Reset your odometer to zero, every single day.

focus on each piece of work each day, how much you spend on it

The 3 Stages of Failure in Life and Work (And How to Fix Them)

1. Stage 1 is a Failure of Tactics. These are HOW mistakes. They occur when you fail to build robust systems, forget to measure carefully, and get lazy with the details. A Failure of Tactics is a failure to execute on a good plan and a clear vision.
2. Stage 2 is a Failure of Strategy. These are WHAT mistakes. They occur when you follow a strategy that fails to deliver the results you want. You can know why you do the things you do and you can know how to do the work, but still choose the wrong what to make it happen.
3. Stage 3 is a Failure of Vision. These are WHY mistakes. They occur when you don’t set a clear direction for yourself, follow a vision that doesn’t fulfill you, or otherwise fail to understand why you do the things you do.
4. Stage 4 is a Failure of Opportunity. These are WHO mistakes. Occur when society failes to provide opportunity for all.